Posted by John Donovan 17 July 2024
In the latest chapter of Shell’s never-ending saga of environmental hypocrisy, the oil giant has decided to backtrack on its grandiose promise to save the planet by recycling plastic waste. Back in 2022, Shell boldly claimed it would convert a whopping 1 million tonnes of plastic waste into oil every year through “advanced recycling.” Now, it turns out this pledge was about as solid as a politician’s promise.
“Advanced” or “chemical” recycling—just fancy terms for breaking down plastic with heat—was Shell’s supposed answer to the plastics pollution crisis. The company started investing in this pyrolysis process back in 2019, even using the resultant oil in a Louisiana plant and declaring its ambition to recycle 1 million tonnes of plastic by 2025. But as of their 2023 sustainability report, Shell quietly confessed: “[I]n 2023 we concluded that the scale of our ambition to turn 1m tonnes of plastic waste a year into pyrolysis oil by 2025 is unfeasible.”